This is now my 3rd year attending GDC in San Francisco. As with other years I usually take this opportunity to visit with my professor who resides in Mountainview, California and use the time on the train to write a post about C3DL, a summary of the year and things to come. In the first year, C3DL had just barely begun. All we had were a couple of spinny cubes. Nothing to write home about really but it was a start. With the extraordinary work put into the project by Andor Salga, and many others, the project showed vast improvements by the second year. We were loading Collada models, we had the foundations of a pretty cool project. Khronos had just announced its specification for what would become WebGL which means applications made with our library would eventually become usable by any browser that supported WebGL. When we first started, we had to use the Canvas 3D addon and it was only available for Firefox. Today, with WebGL, applications made with C3DL work in pre-release versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

We continued working on the library and added several more features. We were also very fortunate to begin work on a different project which gave us the opportunity to actually use the technology that we had built. That project resulted in a web application named Motionview.
Motionview allows an artist to remotely preview and select portions of motion capture shots made at a studio. Initially we were involved with the project to work only on a data converter for the web application. The viewer for the web app was originally going to be done using flash. However, we saw how this project was closely tied with C3DL. After all this application allowed the viewing of an actor’s movement in 3D space. We introduced this idea to our partners on the project and they agreed to use it. I would like to thank both Bedlam Games and the Navarra group for applying our library in a real web application. If you are interested in trying out Motionview, please contact me.

In the fall Andor, went back to school full time and did some amazing work for the processing.js project as part of his open source class. He continued to work on C3DL part time during his studies and we made the port over to WebGL. In early February I had been invited to speak as part of a Khronos sponsored session at GDC and thus I am here for my third year.

This coming summer promises to be very interesting. We will be working with some industry partners to develop our library and to add some really interesting WebGL based applications. Like the development of the motion capture application, these applications will help us add new features to C3DL.